Wednesday, February 1, 2012

WHAT ARE SMART DEVICES?- Smart devices are most popularity gaining devices in today’s world. - Though being a small cordless electronic device, it is capable of serving us many purposes.- It is highly portable and can be connected anywhere to a network like 2G, 3G, 4G, Wi-Fi etc. - You can have a voice and video communication and browse internet.- Smart devices in the coming years are going to outnumber many other devices like cell phones and laptops. - These devices exhibit quite appraisable artificial intelligence and ubiquitous computing factors.

But, what makes these smart deices so popular among users except their features? It is their user friendly GUI (graphical user interface).- The abstraction feature of the OOP is employed here in hiding the interactions between the user and the computer.- These devices are able to optimize themselves according to the environment in which they operate. - To some extent these devices are self governed.

GRAPHICAL USER INTERFACE ON SMART DEVICES- The GUI of these devices is vigorously tested to maintain the standard. - GUIs are a bridge between the software system and the user. - When agitated, the interface responds to the user’s activity like click or mouse movement.- GUI makes it easy to implement the software code and also for users to interact with the device.- GUIs form a major percentage of the program code. - A lot of time is devoted in developing graphical user interface and testing it. - GUIs account for the usability of the device. - The current GUI testing methodologies are mostly manual and ad hoc in nature. - The tools used for GUI testing record the test case execution and captures screen shots during testing.- The recorded sessions are played again and the input test data is manipulated. - This methodology requires a large effort.

Here we are going to discuss some tips regarding GUI testing of smart devices.

- The effectiveness of GUI testing depends on the ability of the tester to develop new interactions between the user and the software. - The best advice for graphical user testing will be to use an automated test generating tool. - This will save you much time and effort.- Before using an automated test generator, you should code for all possible interactions.

Even though the automated test generator provides a great help, there are many decisions that it misses out.

To compensate for this, the better option is to release the beta copy of the GUI and let the users test it and give you the feedback. More the number of testers, more effective will be the testing.

Here we are listing some tips for making GUI testing more effective:

- Having a defined coverage criterion will make it easy for you to decide what to test first.

- Prepare documentation for the test cases that have to be executed. In this documentation, define the test input data to be used for each test case. The input test data should be related to the requirements specifications of the software system.

- Compare the actual output with the expected output and decide what can be done to get the desired output if the two don’t match.

- After you have predicted the outputs for the test cases, execute them one by one and verify the output.

- Most importantly ask yourself questions like:

a) “how to improve the interaction of the user and the system?”b) “how to make it easier for the user to access various features of the device through GUI”, “what are the possible where bugs can be found?”c) “is this GUI compatible with the environment in which it is to be used?” d) “what are the features that should be compulsorily incorporated in to the GUI?”.